STATE OF THE ART; Purging Bloat To Fashion Sleek Software

By DAVID POGUE

Published: January 18, 2007

Life has a funny symmetry, don't you think? When you're born, you're short, toothless and bald. You spend the first part of your life gaining height, teeth and hair -- and the last part losing them again.

Believe it or not, Microsoft Office is following the same trajectory. (This might sound like the stretched analogy of the year, but bear with me.)

Microsoft spent the first dozen years of Office's life piling on new features. Over time, the humble word processor called Word became a photo editor, a Web-design program and a dessert topping. Not one person in a hundred used those extra features. Still, we kept buying the upgrades, thanks to our innate fondness for unnecessary power (see also: S.U.V.'s).

Eventually, however, Microsoft Office developed a reputation for bloat and complexity. It was fully grown: tall, hairy and toothy.

So what did Microsoft do then? It began shrinking Microsoft Office. In fact, the chief sales point of Office 2007 (for Windows XP or Vista), which arrives on Jan. 30, is that it's simpler, it's more streamlined and its documents take up far less disk space.

After a radical redesign, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are almost totally new programs. There are no more floating toolbars; very few tasks require opening dialog boxes, and even the menu bar itself is gone. (Evidently, even Microsoft saw the need for a major feature purge. ''We had some options in there that literally did nothing,'' said Paul Coleman, a product manager.)

Instead, almost the entire world of formatting options has been dug out of Office's guts and artfully arranged on a top-mounted strip of controls called the Ribbon.

You no longer have to spend 20 minutes hunting through menus for Page Numbering or whatever. It's all right there on the Ribbon. What was once buried four layers deep is now arrayed before you in a big software smorgasbord.

Better yet, you can see how each formatting choice will affect your document -- a font, style or color change, let's say, or a slide design in PowerPoint -- just by pointing to a control without clicking. No Apply button, no thumbnail preview; your actual document changes temporarily and automatically. (Unfortunately, this doesn't work with chart styles in Excel.)

The bad news, of course, is that this Office bears very little resemblance to the one you may have spent years learning. Virtually everything has been moved around or renamed. Count on a couple of weeks of frustration as you play the free bonus game called Find the Feature.

The game is so challenging because the Ribbon changes. Its controls change depending on which of the seven permanent tabs you click at the top of the screen (Home, Insert, View, and so on). Still other Ribbons appear only when needed -- a graphics Ribbon appears, for example, when you click a picture in the document.

You're stuck with the tabs Microsoft gives you. You can't rearrange them or hide the ones you never use. Even if you never create form letters or write academic dissertations, the Mailings and References tabs will be there on the Ribbon forever, wasting space.

Nor is that the only loss of customization. Microsoft has also removed the ability to create custom toolbars stocked with the features, fonts or style sheets you use most. In Office 2007, the only thing you can customize is something called the Quick Access Bar: a tiny row of unlabeled icons, awkwardly jammed in above or below the Ribbon.

The second big disruptive change is the new file format. Microsoft, to its credit, hasn't touched the standard Word, Excel and PowerPoint file formats for 10 years. You never had to worry that your colleagues' Macs or PCs wouldn't be able to open your documents.

Now you do. The new file formats (.docx for Word, for example) are much more compact than the old ones, and they're also easier to recover from data corruption. But older versions of Office for Windows can't open them without a free converter (available at microsoftoffice.com). Office 2004 for Macintosh can't open them at all, although shareware and Web conversion utilities are available.

Fortunately, you can easily instruct your copy of Office 2007 to save its documents in the older format. In these turbulent transitional times, that might be a good idea.

The Ribbon reorg and new document formats are by far the most important changes in Office 2007. There are, of course, some other new features, especially in Word.

Word has always let you define style sheets: memorized sets of formatting characteristics -- for headings and captions, for example -- that you can apply with one click. Now, however, there are sets of coordinated styles. One click on Elegant or Formal, for example, impressively reformats all styles in an entire document.

What used to be called the File menu is still present in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, although it's now represented by the Office logo. Its submenus offer Quick Print, which prints one copy on your main printer -- no dialog boxes required. Excellent; how often, really, does the average person switch printers?